By Jill Dyché
In which Jill in turn celebrates and laments the euphemism.
We lost some good ones in 2008. Tim Russert is gone and so is Albert Hofman, the inventor of LSD.
(Sunday morning television and Saturday night raves will never be quite the same.) But the biggest loss was George Carlin. Carlin was a legend, and his sense of humor informed my own. The first time I ever heard “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” I understood how important it was to break the rules, and that the funniest people are often outlaws.
Carlin was a master with words, their double-entendres, their exaggerations, their misinterpretations, He had some great one-liners: “Can a stupid person be a smart-ass?” “Do pilots take crash-courses?” And there’s this one:
In a well-known bit on euphemisms he took on the softening of some popular terms: toilet paper was “bathroom tissue,” uniforms were “career apparel,” and constipation was “occasional irregularity.”
We don’t even realize it but people in IT do this all the time. A set of programming steps becomes a system development lifecycle. A spreadsheet becomes a data mart. A database with data from more than one source becomes an enterprise data warehouse. A list of acronyms becomes a data dictionary. Outlook becomes an enterprise messaging platform. Three guys working on the same project become a Center of Excellence.
Is there an example of this in your company? Share it! I promise I’ll protect the guilty. Make that “cover for the willfully deceitful.”
